I KEEP FORGETTING certain words in my mother tongue. The problem is not that I can’t remember them in Spanish, but rather that now they will come to me in English first. Where my sentences were once as tame and rigid as they were monolingual, living in the United States for three years has turned me into a more hybrid speaker. Even when talking with my friends in Mexico, I’ll now regularly switch back and forth between languages—así, sin pensarlo—often without thinking.
I hadn’t paid much attention to this linguistic habit until earlier this year, in January, when my friend Ale from high school made fun of me for it. The two of us were hanging out in La Condesa—a highly gentrified neighborhood in Mexico City, increasingly populated by American and European digital nomads—when Ale interrupted me mid-sentence. “When did you start talking like that?” she said in Spanish. “¿De cuándo acá hablas así?”
“¿Cómo?” I asked before switching. “What do you mean?”
Ale replied by performing her meanest, though admittedly funny, Andrés impression, mimicking my Spanglish in a highly caricatured tono fresa—the Mexican equivalent of a Valley Girl accent.
I tried to shrug it off, telling her I didn’t know she was a language purist—using the Spanish “no sabía que eras una” and the English “language purist.” (The Spanish term, purista lingüística, felt strangely foreign and overly formal, especially for a conversation with a close friend.)
Still, something about Ale’s comment stuck with me. I would think about it back in Cambridge after the winter break, especially whenever I’d have dinner with my blockmates. Even though five of them are fellow Latin Americans, we rarely speak a “pure” Spanish. With a Chilean, a Dominican, a Puerto Rican, a Nicaraguan, a Guatemalan, and myself, our conversations are conducted in a shared language that might best be described as “Chile-Domini-Currican,” interspersed with English connectives and fillers.
Speaking on the Spanish-language podcast El Invitado de RFI eight years ago, Mexican-born writer Valeria Luiselli noted that the richest and most enjoyable Spanish she knows is that which is spoken among Mexicans in the United States. Later, in a 2020 interview with the magazine Infobae, Luiselli said that speakers who start sentences in one language before ending them in another may be linguistic polluters, but that very act of pollution—contaminación linguística—is what brings about changes in how we communicate with each other. Those of us who exist between two worlds come to inhabit and reproduce a third language.
Yet navigating this third language is easier for some than others. Those of us who were raised in Latin America experience it differently, I believe, from Latinos who grew up in the U.S. Before living in Cambridge, for instance, English was a language I only spoke in certain classes at school; it wasn’t the language of real life, of everyday experience. To have English (and Spanglish) become the languages I speak more regularly has thus entailed, at least for me, a very subtle kind of loss. Living away from home, I have lost my grip, even if only slightly, on Spanish. But Spanish, I must admit, has lost its grip on me, too.
I enjoy living in English, after all—perhaps more than I ever did in Spanish. To be myself in a new language has offered me the chance to start anew, to self-fashion differently. Yet the opportunity for reinvention is not something exclusively lent to us international students. When I asked some of my American friends whether their way of speaking had changed since coming to college, they all intuitively answered in the positive. But when I asked them to describe these changes with greater detail, they all replied by telling me how they had changed as people: becoming more confident, less judgmental, and more analytical.
Their answers made me appreciate how personal transformation is more readily evident to those of us who are constantly crossing national and linguistic boundaries. We can hear ourselves changing based on the words we use and the sentences we thread. But all of us—international or American—change when we leave home for college.
IN HIS ESSAY “Translating a Person,” Chilean poet Alejandro Zambra describes his experience speaking English for a year while on a fellowship at the New York Public Library. “Very soon I wasn’t translating myself,” writes Zambra, describing how experiencing himself in English could sometimes feel as though he were mimicking some stranger. “I aspired to know, at the very least, whom I was imitating.” A Mexican friend must have thought the same of me one night over dinner at Annenberg Hall during my freshman year. Sitting at table B-11 (Be-once, or Beyoncé, the table that we international Latinos would frequent), she told me that I sometimes felt like a stranger when I spoke English. I don’t remember how I responded, but I do remember thinking the same of her.
Some of my international peers who grew up speaking other languages similarly feel that their behavior changes whenever they switch to English. Faseeh, a friend from Pakistan, recently told me that speaking in English forces him to slow down to find the right words to communicate his thoughts and feelings, something he doesn’t do when talking in Sindhi. “It’s like I’m switching between different persons,” he said. “I see myself being more introspective, which turns out to be nice. It gives me more time to think about things.” Perhaps for similar reasons, I have found English to be a much better language to write about myself. To do so in Spanish would feel incredibly self-absorbed, even solipsistic. But English, in its foreignness, provides me with a certain detachment: a necessary and much-appreciated psychological distance.
This detachment hadn’t been a problem for me until this semester, when my creative writing professor tasked our class with a daunting exercise: writing the story of our lives in under 15 minutes. Even as the sound of scribbling around me intensified, I couldn’t bring myself to start answering the prompt. How could I write about the beginning of my life—my childhood in Mexico—in a language other than Spanish? I started to realize that, although my writing education has been largely conducted in English, I will always need my mother tongue to make sense of my history.
When I shared this experience with a close friend, an international student from China, I asked her whether she had a favorite language. She told me that, even though she now feels more comfortable communicating and arguing for herself in English, especially in academic contexts, she still prefers Chinese. “It’s the language I grew up with,” she explained. Her response, coupled with my experience in the creative writing workshop, made me see that the questions I had been pondering were only superficially about language. What truly worried me was the process of becoming a different person from the one I was before Harvard, back home in Mexico City.
GROWING UP can sometimes feel like an exercise in self-estrangement, especially when that process is happening away from home. We push ourselves to abide by the codes and rules of the new places we inhabit, and this can make for a tiring performance. But then that strange self we create becomes newly familiar. We shed who we once were to discover who we have become, and though the shedding can be a source of anxiety, it doesn’t cease to be necessary. It is growth.
“When I think of how I’ve grown,” my friend Summer recently told me, “I don’t only think about how I’ve grown since high school. I implicitly compare myself to how I think I would have grown had I stayed on the road more traveled.” Summer was raised in Chico, a small city north of Sacramento, and when she was choosing what college to attend, she opted to leave California because she wanted to follow the path that would allow her to change the most. “California will always be waiting for me,” she said.
It is difficult for me to think of the person I would be today had I stayed in Mexico. I would probably be studying biomedicine at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, doing research in the same laboratory where I worked as a high school student, and speaking the “purer” kind of Spanish I spoke just three years ago. Living in Cambridge has radically changed me: I am a humanities concentrator, I write for magazines like this one, and I constantly oscillate between Spanish and English. You could say I’ve grown a lot. He cambiado, he crecido.
